Kill the BIll

by David Trumbull - March 19, 2010

The 1944 motion picture Hail the Conquering Hero was on Turner Classic Movies recently. It was written and directed by Preston Sturges, so it goes without saying that it’s rolling-on-the-floor-laughing-uncontrollably funny. It’s one of the few Sturges films I had not seen before, so I welcomed the opportunity. Besides, I needed some comic relief.

I had been reading and watching too much of the liberal Democrats in Congress demonstrating that there is no action—however dishonorable, crooked, and unconstitutional—to which they will not resort in their determination to put decisions about your health care in the hands of Washington bureaucrats. Of course they want to do it for our good, even if something like two-thirds or even three-quarters of us don’t want healthcare run with the compassion of the Internal Revenue Service.

Sturges was a genius at satirizing that type of politician so common on Beacon Hill and Capitol Hill. In Hail the Conquering Hero he gives us Mayor Everett D. Noble, a man of little accomplishment and less character, whose political philosophy consists solely of his unshakeable belief that the citizens are lucky to have him as mayor.

In another Sturges film, The Great McGinty (1940) he has a politician saying: “If it wasn't for graft, you'd get a very low type of people in politics. Men without ambition.” One thing you have to say about Obama, Pelosi, and the rest of that pestilential crew is—they are ambitious. They will not stop until they control every aspect of your life (and death, for Sarah Palin hit the nail on the head about the “Obama Death Panels.”)

At the Tea Parties and in countless other ways the people of America yell: “KILL THE BILL.” We The People—the people that the liberals look down on as the great unenlightened peasantry—are crying out, “No we don’t want this.” And in November they will say, at the ballot-box, “No, we don’t want you.”

As Charles Krauthammer said:

For liberals, the observation that “the peasants are revolting” is a pun. For conservatives, it is cause for uncharacteristic optimism.

[David Trumbull is the chairman of the Boston Ward Three Republican Committee. Boston's Ward Three includes the North End, West End, part of Beacon Hill, downtown, waterfront, Chinatown, and part of the South End.]

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